Grasping Mysteries Page 3
NIGHTINGALE
(1820–1910)
A Girl’s Education
HAMPSHIRE, ENGLAND, 1832
Florence offers drops of water to a bird with a bent wing.
Her mother doesn’t complain about that, but she finds faults
in fractions of Florence, tells her not to tramp
through fields, bandage a farmer’s limping dog,
or study mathematics books in the stable.
The maid who braids Florence’s hair and buttons her dresses
in the back complains that burrs and brambles stick in the silk.
The governess wishes Florence
was more like her older sister,
who doesn’t study spiders or champion families of mice.
She’s not the first governess to go.
When Florence turns thirteen, Father takes over lessons
in history, languages, composition, physics, and astronomy.
He’s not skilled in Florence’s favorite subject, so orders
mathematics books and arranges for a cousin to tutor.
Florence likes balancing columns of numbers,
checking sums and being certain she’s right.
Subtraction is soothing, though she dislikes
landing on zero. Something is missing. She wants more.
Divided
Mother says it’s proper to bring beef broth,
jellies, and egg pudding to the sick in the village.
Florence should pray for the poor, but not give away
her own shawl or linger in a farmer’s cottage
to wipe feverish foreheads. Mother believes
Florence takes goodness too far.
God loves all people alike, she reads in the Bible,
but the history of England insists on differences.
Florence tends to sick babies of families who live
in homes smaller than any of the fifteen bedrooms
in the Nightingale manor. She steps back out
into air scented with wild roses.
Chickens cluck as a rooster struts, flings back
his head so sunlight strikes the red coxcomb.
The Palace Garden
Queen Victoria, crowned last year, is nineteen,
and Florence eighteen,
when rich girls are presented at the court.
Mother orders her a white dress from Paris.
A maid elaborately twists and pins her smooth hair.
Florence bends her knees to the proper angle,
gathers her skirt to the correct height.
As she shuffles backward, careful not to turn the wrong side
to royalty, she wonders what the queen thinks about power:
she can rule an empire, but no woman can be a member
of Parliament, preach, go to a university, or vote.
Outside the throne room, duchesses raise china cups,
wave silk fans, then snap them shut.
Florence steps to the garden, where a field spider
scuttles in circles, raising a leg to make a web.
Each fragile strand shows her where to go next.
Seeking
During her twenties, Florence tutors factory girls,
translates German articles for her father,
dances at balls, inventories the household silver, and
makes fifty-six pots of gooseberry jam one afternoon.
She turns down proposals from two good men.
While she’s not certain of what she wants to find,
she believes marriage might limit her views.
Florence sets down her embroidery hoop. Its stretched
fabric had multiple tiny squares, places to stitch
small crosses of varied colors that build a picture.
By candlelight, she reads books about hospitals,
learns that most offer surgery and medicine,
but no one to make sure
patients are eating, sleeping, kept clean and calm.
She tells her mother, I want to be a nurse.
That’s no work for a lady. Mother approves of those
who might faint when faced with blood or naked skin.
She hopes Florence’s restlessness will be cured
by traveling with a maid to chaperone and tend to her hair.
In Egypt, Florence sails down the Nile River,
rides a camel across the desert and climbs a pyramid.
In Alexandria, carrying two chameleons in her pocket,
she tours a hospital run by nuns.
In Greece, she rescues a baby owl fallen from a nest
from boys who poke it and laugh.
She strolls among stone relics and temples in Rome
with Lord and Lady Herbert and other British tourists,
eating hot chestnuts from a folded handkerchief.
She spends half an afternoon lying on the Sistine Chapel
floor, looking up at Michelangelo’s painted ceiling.
What she sees is astonishing, but Florence wants more.
In Germany, she finds a new job for her maid
and books a room in a hospital run by a religious sisterhood.
At thirty years old, for the first time
Florence parts and pins up
her hair herself. After months of caring for patients,
she’s awarded a nursing certificate by the nuns.
The Chance
Florence takes a job
at the Institution for the Care of Sick Gentlewomen,
where she’s an excellent manager as well as nurse.
After England, France, and Turkey declare war
on Russia, her old friend Lord Herbert asks for help.
Florence buys and packs portable stoves, spare pairs
of sturdy shoes, a toolbox, and binoculars.
She buys white caps to keep her hair off her face
and dark dresses: none with hoops sewn in the hems
that would keep her from getting close
to those who need help.
She recruits thirty-eight more nurses, mostly
Protestant or Catholic nuns, to take a train to the shore
where ships bring soldiers shot on battlefields.
In November 1854, when she and the nurses arrive
at the hospital, a general says, Go home.
This is no place for ladies.
Florence doesn’t turn back. She makes plans
and meets newspaper writers who are shunned
by military officers who dislike
their grim reports about deaths and battles lost.
Late one afternoon, Florence finds her binoculars,
watches birds swoop over the Black Sea. The sky darkens.
She sees Venus, Mars, and a bright spot
that might be Saturn, once thought to mark
the farthest part of the universe, but that changed.
Breaking Rank
TURKEY, 1854
At last doctors admit they’re desperate for help.
On the Crimean Peninsula, for the first time
women nurse British military men.
The thirty-nine nurses get seven rooms for storage,
work, and sleeping. They’re allowed two cups of water a day.
Florence chooses clean hands and face over tea.
She counts buckets, brooms, beds, twenty chamber pots,
and seven latrines for more than six hundred patients,
some lying on floors or in tents set up around the building.
She can’t count the smell, blood, flies, fleas, rats, or screams.
Doctors tell her how military men are ranked and say,
We treat officers before the common soldiers.
Florence doesn’t care about badges or buttons
embossed with swords, stars, and wreaths.
The world is not meant to be so divided
between rich and poor, generals and infantrymen.
She tells the nurses, Care for whoever is
sickest first.
The Hammer
Florence seeks ways to get more clean water, healthy food,
blankets, a little peace and order. She measures
the inches between beds to document crowding,
takes notes on how many enter the hospital
and how many leave alive.
She’s too busy to compare records from before
she came and now, but looks forward to doing the math
when she’s not cracking open windows,
ordering two hundred scrub brushes, cleaning
for patients’ comfort and to stop the spread of disease.
When she asks doctors to wash their hands
and surgical knives between treating patients,
they say, Don’t tell us how to do our job, Miss Nightingale.
They refuse to unlock the closet where medicine is stored.
Florence doesn’t have time to wait for them
to dole out what can heal. Patients need help now.
She finds a basket and hammer. She folds her hand
around the hammer’s smooth handle and aims it at the lock.
The metal cracks. The cabinet door splinters.
She scoops up tinctures, salts, tins of pills,
extracts, and fills the wicker basket.
She carefully measures and records the doses
given to patients grateful for the gentle touch
of her uncurled fist. After dark,
she quietly carries an oil lamp, checking bandages
and fevers, listening to soldiers who can’t sleep.
Some reach out to touch the shadow she leaves behind.
One Plus One
The nurses struggle to keep men still during amputations.
They help others stand and walk,
hold the hands of dying men.
Some nurses become ill themselves, or are homesick,
sad, scared, or stung by the doctors’ insults.
Within weeks, a quarter of them go back to England.
Florence is exhausted but keeps on,
asking patients on the mend to care for other soldiers,
bidding their wives to wash clothes,
mop floors, and sew sacks to stuff with straw.
Needing more help, she talks to reporters
who are grateful she’s given them stories
to write with both honesty and hope. Reporters organize
fundraisers for medicine, food, and warm clothes,
write that soldiers call her an angel
or “the Lady with the Lamp.” They don’t mention
doctors call her “the Lady with the Hammer.”
Ledgers
As Florence tends to patients, she notes and tallies
who gets better and who worse. Counting helps
keep her calm, but she steels herself for subtraction.
Long past midnight, she addresses letters to England.
She sends families a soldier’s last words
and sometimes the remains of his salary.
She asks some people for help, thanks
those who send socks, soap, flannel, doormats,
raspberry preserves, and ginger biscuits.
The queen, having heard that hospital smells
are unpleasant, offers to send a case of eau de cologne.
Florence gracefully declines. She wishes
everyone would save postage and just send money.
After the War
Florence returns to England ill herself, deeply tired.
She is the second-most-famous woman in Europe.
The most famous invites her to the palace.
Florence is highly praised for saving lives,
but it’s not enough. More wars are bound to come.
Diseases won’t go away. Before visiting the queen,
she pores over her lists of patients, what ailed them,
the treatments, and the length of each stay.
She draws columns of those who lived or died.
Within six months of her arrival, the death rate
dropped from 42 percent to 2 percent.
Can she show that if one hospital changed,
with some addition and multiplication,
a single story can fan into many?
The busy queen may grant her three minutes:
longer than a curtsy, but shorter than sipping a cup of tea.
How can Florence tell even a little of what she knows
about sickness and health? Numbers can hold
more than words in the same small space,
but she doubts the queen has patience for much paper.
Florence makes diagrams to show at a glance
what the hospital was like when she came
and the more hope-filled one she created.
Bars of different lengths are set in rows
since amounts seen side by side tell more
than when shown alone. Still she needs more.
Mulling, she walks in the park, smells rosebushes,
spots a spiderweb’s delicate and orderly patterns.
She rushes back home and draws a circle
divided into twelve wedges that stand for each month
of the year to show changes over time.
She adds layers within the slices, some protruding
like rose petals, notched like a rooster’s red coxcomb.
Dates and causes of illness overlap and can quickly be seen
on her rose diagram, coxcomb graph, and pie charts.
Circles on a Tea Table
Florence curtsies to the queen, who thanks her
for her kindness. After niceties, Florence hands her
the rose diagrams and coxcomb graphs she created.
They show dates and causes of illness side by side
or overlapping, so connections can be seen at a glance.
Florence explains that hospital survival rates rose
when bedding, floors, and doctors’ hands were clean.
The queen lifts her silk fan. Florence worries
she’s being dismissed, but instead servants carry
in a pot of tea, stacks of biscuits, and silver dishes of jam.
The queen asks to hear more, listens, unbuttons
her white gloves, and looks over charts that show
that for every man who died of wounds from weapons,
about seven died from disease caught in the hospitals.
Queen Victoria’s eyes grow smaller, as if she’s pinching
back tears. She says, This must never happen again.
Please send this information to the war office.
Past the Window Frame
Settled in London, Florence gathers still more numbers.
She hammers out eight hundred pages of words
and two hundred more of graphs and charts
she sends to military men and doctors, who read,
discuss, and soon treat patients more effectively.
Florence founds the Nightingale Training School for Nurses.
For the first time, women can train in a hospital
not run by a church. In the course of her life,
Florence pens fourteen thousand letters, many advising
Americans working near Civil War battlefields.
She writes a book about nursing that shows the science
behind patient care that women have long given:
plants and flowers freshen the air,
clean bedding keeps disease from spreading,
and kind words create a steadier pulse and heartbeat.
Florence knows people are sick or dying not only in war,
but women, children, and men are at risk
right here in the capital of England.
To convince members of Parliament of the need for change,
she asks workers to count how many people live
in one room and the number of windows in a home.
She charts the
sources of water and heat,
pipes and plumbing, if any,
to show how health and housing are related.
The world should be less divided, more fair.
Florence oversees studies of child labor, poorhouses,
and deaths from childbirth, making records
she hopes will convince city and country leaders
of the need for reform.
She tries to keep her aim steady as noon light,
though statistics are shaped not just by numbers
but also chance, wishes, and despair.
Even sturdy records have shadows that shift.
More
In Florence’s old age, a lifeboat, a racehorse,
and babies are named after her. Admirers write ballads,
piano pieces, and books in her honor.
A pledge named after her
is recited by devoted nurses around the world.
Merchants print her portrait on grocery bags.
She becomes the first woman elected
to the Royal Statistical Society.
Florence is almost ninety when she puts down
her pen on a desk covered with stacks of letters,
some with sealing wax stamped with a crown.
She switches on a new lamp that needn’t be filled with oil,
pushes back the lace curtains, looks out
at protesters who wave signs reading: VOTES FOR WOMEN!
Florence remembers the girl she used to be,
and silently, happily, counts women who want more.
EXPLORING CURRENTS
HERTHA MARKS AYRTON
(1854–1923)
The Watch Repairman’s Daughter
PORTSMOUTH, ENGLAND, 1861
A girl balances on a branch, peers through green leaves.
Her brothers shoot marbles, shout, skylark on the street.
Phoebe Sarah Marks, who’s called Sarah,
jumps down from the tree, dashes up to the two rooms
over a shop, home to the family of nine.
The youngest crawl or circle the desk
where their father works. His hands
hover quietly as prayer over the insides of a watch.
Look inside. Look closer. Papa explains
that the hands of the watch go around
when the force of an unwinding spring pushes gears,